


Dream, and fall, and dream

by Ammeh



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-20
Updated: 2011-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-31 08:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1029390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ammeh/pseuds/Ammeh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post DAII.  Amell has been carrying a torch for Anders for years.<br/>Anders never knew, and has moved on with his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream, and fall, and dream

**Author's Note:**

> Posted ages ago (hence the backdating) on the DA kink meme for this prompt: http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/5691.html?thread=18776635t18776635

He shows up on her doorstep one evening, some months after news of broken Circles and Chantries in ashes has trickled through the taverns and louched into cloudy tales of heroes and demons.

She doesn’t care, and she expects he knew that—she has black-and-white to worry about, darkspawn popping up from holes and ravaging a village here, a caravan there like some unending game of wallop.

No one stays.  Everyone has some dream of their own to set off on, and she is left with the pieces, to find new recruits with their own seedling dreams to follow one day.

In the Tower, she never dared to dream—and then she was too busy, had an entire country’s dreams to save.

The dust settled—and then her dream came, with laughing eyes and a mile-wide fear of commitment.  And she was too busy to follow through on it—talking darkspawn and angry nobles popping up at every turn, and maybe once this had all settled down?

But he was gone, then—when she came back from Weisshaupt he was gone and a spirit with him.

Her dreams went too, but no one knew that part save her.

And now he’s here again, in front of her—the laugher in his eyes gone for a fierce hope, a determination she never knew him to have. 

“Commander,” he says, hesitant.  “I—I don’t know what you’ve heard down here, but I need—“

“A place to stay?” she says, warmly.  “Or hide, perhaps?” she winks, and she can’t remember the last time she did that.

He stays there for an evening, and he is both of them at once now, two friends she never thought to see again.  Whispers tease at the back of her skull like a demon’s caress— _he could love you now, you know_ , they say.  _Just you—you can protect him, and he would remain by your side._   With Justice in his soul, he spent years dedicated to the poor and to the mages and surely he could dedicate himself to a woman now, just one?

It is truer than she realizes.

\--

In the morning, Anders’ smile _glows_ , and her stomach flutters dizzily—he is slower with his smiles now, but they are warmer, more sincere.

“There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Commander,” he says.  “You know that I trust you, but—I had to make sure.  This is—important.  The most important thing to me, right now, and I had to be _positive_.”

He will bring it to her, he says, and she decides that when he returns she will ask him to call her by her name.

And in the next few months, she will try to make _herself_ the most important thing to him.

\--

But the most important thing is a woman already, it seems—one with daggers on her back and grime in her hair, as dusty as Anders had been before she let him use her bath—and she had heard rumors that Kirkwall’s Champion had fled as well, perhaps this is her?

She can see herself in the woman’s face, and before she can ask for a name Anders introduces her, a proud glow in his eyes.

“The Champion of Kirkwall,” he says, smiling.  “My wife.”

And the dreams that had just landed on her shoulder once again are shattered.

After she blinks the mist from her eyes, and does her best to smile through the introductions, she sees the swollen curve of the woman’s belly under her scuffed leather armor, and she hates her even more in that moment, for giving Anders something she herself never could have.

She is struck silent, all the things she was going to say to win him over are no longer relevant, and she finds herself floundering to break the silence until she remembers Ser Pounce.

“Your cat is here,” she says, and he seems happier than he was to see her.

\--

She is sullen over dinner, and she knows it, but Anders is an old friend and a fellow Warden and she can hardly throw him—or his _wife_ , she thinks bitterly—out of her house in a fit of jealous rage.

And the woman is pregnant, and they clearly haven’t been eating well, so she makes a stew, and the Champion helps, and she wishes the woman were a worse cook so she would have _something_ to feel superior about.

They eat in silence, confusion clear on Anders’ face and she wishes she could fake happiness, but she’s had nothing of her own in _years_ , nothing that couldn’t be bought with gold, and she’s beginning to think she never will.

“You were trained at the Circle in Fereldan, weren’t you?” Hawke says suddenly, setting her spoon down with a soft clatter.  “I knew the Knight-Captain at the Gallows—Cullen.  He spoke fondly of you, often.”

And she remembers that time before she dared to dream, a handsome Templar apprentice and hopes caged like butterflies in her heart.

“Do you think…they could use some help, in Kirkwall?” she asks.  “Setting things in order?”

Anders smiles.  “Undoubtedly.”


End file.
